by Rainer, Marc
It suddenly hit Trask like a punch from that golden gloves champion—the punch that had knocked him into the next county. He’s picked his battle on the ground that he knows he can defend. We’re already in the sentencing hearing, before the jury’s returned a guilty verdict!
“I can’t speak for my superiors, Mr. Burns.” Earth to Gray, object on the grounds that the question calls for speculation, you moron. Nope, he doesn’t get it. Thinks this is all chummy preliminary stuff.
“Oh, I think it’s safe to say that you are a rising star in your office. Otherwise, you would not be trusted to handle major investigations like this one, don’t you agree?”
Gray, you’re a potted plant. No objection again? How do I answer this without looking like an asshole? “No, Mr. Burns, I’m just mean and they want to see me fail, or get attacked, or killed.” Let’s try this. “Your assessment is very kind, Mr. Burns.”
“Oh, I think it is entirely merited, Mr. Trask. After all, you are the one who took my expert apart in the now famous case of the United States v. Demetrius Reid, are you not?”
“We had evidence that did that, Mr. Burns.”
“I think you are being very modest, but so be it. At any rate, you would have to agree that your office—the people in your office—may feel like they have a very personal stake in the outcome of this matter, would you not? Especially after you and your wife were personally attacked?”
Gray? Oh for heaven’s sake. “Mr. Burns, you are aware that it is because I was an intended victim that our entire office was disqualified from prosecuting the case, and that’s why Mr. Gray is handling this trial.”
“That is essentially a Department of Justice rule, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“It is also a Department of Justice policy that an attorney should never interrogate a defendant without a witness being present, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“But you did that in this case?”
“Only after I knew I would be disqualified from trying the matter because of attempts on my life and on the life of my wife. The reason we have witnesses at interrogations is so we are not disqualified from trying a case. I already knew I would be disqualified. In addition, as I explained on direct examination, I had multiple witnesses monitoring my contact with Mr. Moreno over a sound feed from his room to the nurse’s station.”
“And why couldn’t someone else—one of your agents or detectives—why couldn’t one of them have conducted this interrogation?”
“They could have.” And the way this is going, maybe they should have.
“But they didn’t.”
“No.”
“And is that because your Department also believes that you have superior investigative skills?”
“Objection, Your Honor!” Gray exclaimed.
He lives, Trask thought.
“And the basis for your objection, Mr. Gray?” Judge Dean asked.
“I…withdraw my objection.”
You’re kidding me. No, you’re killing me.
The judge shrugged. “Answer the question, Mr. Trask.”
“I do my best, Mr. Burns. What others think of my efforts I can’t say.”
“It was you, after all, Mr. Trask, and not one of your agents or detectives, who found that critical piece of evidence, that proverbial smoking gun in the Reid case, wasn’t it?”
Trask waited a moment before answering, staring at Gray, who was writing notes to himself again. Relevance, you idiot, relevance. He looked up at the judge. Their eyes met, and Trask knew he understood, but Waymon Dean was old school. He let the lawyers try their cases. No objection meant no objection, regardless of the rules of evidence. The evidence was coming in; the question had to be answered.
“Yes, I found the evidence that proved Mr. Reid was not insane.”
“Thank you, Mr. Trask. I’d like to take you back for a moment to the instant in which you saw your wife bound—and as you described it on direct examination—you thought lifeless, on the floor of your home. If you had seen her attacker standing over her, and you had been armed, what would you have done?”
Again, no objection. Oh well, cat’s out of the bag now. To object would be to emphasize it even more, and now I’m back in the election of 1988. Trask looked at the judge again. Dean just nodded. Trask turned back to Burns.
“At that time, and under those circumstances, Mister Burns, I would have shot that man dead.”
Burns walked slowly back to his table before turning to face the judge. “No more questions.”
Gray finally stood. “The prosecution rests.”
Burns was on his feet immediately. “As does the defense, Your Honor.”
April 5, 10:00 a.m.
Trask had been allowed to watch the closing arguments, since he was not subject to recall following the completion of his testimony. The guilty verdicts came in fairly quickly, as expected. Burns had barely contested the evidence of his client’s crimes and had just asked the jurors to consider all the evidence and viewpoints of the witnesses before arriving at their verdicts. The evidence was overwhelming.
Always tactically sound, Trask thought as he listened to the defense counsel’s guilt phase summation. He won’t sacrifice his credibility with the jury trying to lead them somewhere they won’t go. They have to be willing to consider what he says about the penalty; if he tries to sell them a crock now they won’t even listen to him later.
The verdicts came back so quickly that Judge Dean moved them straight into the sentencing hearing, breaking only for lunch.
When the case resumed, there was victim impact testimony from the surviving family members of the murder victims who had families. The lawyer’s widows and children, as well as a sister of the slain legal secretary, all testified that their lives had been shattered by the bullets that took their loved ones. It was the usual gut-wrenching stuff, sudden mortality thrust upon those who were not expecting it. Even lawyers did piss-poor jobs of preparing for their own deaths. One of the attorneys hadn’t had a will, and his estate was a mess—a further complication for his wife and kids.
Gray went first in closing argument. Trask listened to what seemed to be a philosophy dissertation. Sure, there were references to the lives lost, but Gray had never studied the true art of prosecution—how to safely say what the appellate courts would not otherwise allow you to say. The courts had decreed that it would be error for Gray to invite the jurors to “place yourselves in the shoes of those poor souls as they were bound and waited for their own executions,” so he didn’t say it. He did not know how to achieve the same effect without crossing the forbidden line.
Trask mentally rewrote the argument for him. Mister Boydston, bound and too terrified to scream, watches as complete strangers force Lynette Morris, his trusted secretary of twenty years, to kneel at his feet. He sees them fire a bullet into her brain. He then waits for that sound to be repeated. The sound of a gun masked by a silencer. The last sound he ever heard. These are the crimes committed by, ordered by, repeated by Luis Moreno. See, Gray? You don’t have to use the forbidden words, but you can still get there from here. This is why I’ll never be a judge. It’s why Lassiter said he could never be one. Too tough to watch the incompetents at work with so much at stake.
Burns’ remarks did not suffer from such sterility. He reviewed the evidence, stressed the death of Carolina Moreno in the way that Gray should have described the deaths of the other victims.
“This beautiful little girl, the light of her father’s life, was repeatedly brutalized to the point that she could no longer face even the prospect of another dawn. Raped six times, she took her own life. It would not be an exaggeration to say that those six rapists—those barbaric gang thugs who had destroyed so much of Luis Moreno’s country and his family—also destroyed his life that night. The decision that he made afterward, to seek revenge, may not have been a lawful one. It was nevertheless an understandable one. Perhaps even one that would have been undertaken by others,
under similar circumstances.”
As I admitted on cross, Trask thought.
“Ladies and gentlemen, search your memories to try and recall the last execution in this city. Odds are that you can’t remember one. We don’t undertake such things lightly. There have been terrible crimes, horrific crimes, senseless crimes committed without the smallest fragment of justification, and we have not inflicted death just because someone else did so. Is this really the case in which we should change course? A case in which even a trusted officer of the Department of Justice admitted on the stand that he would have felt just like Luis Moreno upon seeing the lifeless body of a loved one at his feet? Or is this a case in which the Department of Justice has sought the ultimate punishment because one of their own—one of their best—was himself attacked?
“OBJECTION!” screamed Gray.
“SUSTAINED!” shouted Judge Dean, bringing down his gavel with a thunderclap that echoed through the room. “Mr. Burns, there is no evidence to support such a claim, and you know better than that. The jury will disregard the last statement.”
Sure they will, Trask thought. They’ll disregard your last instruction, judge. If the prosecution pulls something like that, it’s reversible error. The defense gets a meaningless curative instruction, but wins by crossing the line.
Three hours later, the people of the District of Columbia informed the court that Luis Moreno should go to a federal pen for the remainder of his existence on the planet earth. He would not face the death penalty.
Trask left the courtroom and headed back toward the witness room. He felt a tug on his coat, and turned to face G. Gary Gray.
“This is all your fault, Trask. He pinned you on the stand and your stupid answer sunk us!”
“I was under oath, Gray, and had to tell the truth. That was my job up there. It wasn’t to put a notch on your gun. That question—hell, that whole line of questioning—was objectionable, but you let Burns lead me down that little path by sitting on your hands because you’ve never read the rules of evidence. Besides that, I’d have looked like a liar if I’d said anything else. Go Google Kitty Dukakis and learn something. Don’t worry, though, you get your name in the paper again tomorrow, and Moreno’s gone for good. One of those big firms whose butts you’ve been licking will call, and you’ll be gone, too. Have a nice life on the civil suit side. You’ll be a lot better at settling cases than you are at trying them.”
Trask turned and walked away. Gray turned back toward the courtroom and found Barry Doroz standing in front of him.
“Best summation of the day,” Doroz said, pointing toward Trask.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
May 5, 11:20 a.m.
G. Gary Gray was packing. He had been invited to be a junior partner in a large firm in Georgetown and was happy to be leaving the office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Virginia. He was wrapping a very nice granite desk set with bubble-wrap when the audible chirp on his computer alerted him to the receipt of an e-mail.
Shit! He thought. Thought I’d cleared them all.
He grabbed the mouse and opened the e-mail, which was a request from a case manager in the Bureau of Prisons, inquiring as to whether there was any necessity for the separation within the federal prison system of an inmate named Luis Moreno from any other inmates or groups of inmates.
Gray looked at the monitor. He ought to be on death row anyway.
He clicked on the reply button and sent a response reading, “No need for 253 separation.”
May 7, 2:30 p.m.
Trask looked around the task force conference room. All the incident reports had been pulled from the walls, leaving only the pin holes where the summaries had been before. Weeks of searching for Esteban Ortega had led them nowhere. There had been an indictment returned, but it would mean nothing without a defendant to be tried. Santos had been debriefed at least four times, but it seemed like the DC clique of the MS-13 had been disbanded. Ortega had most likely melted into the thousands of Maras living in Fairfax County, Virginia. If some cop got lucky one day and stopped him for littering or something, maybe they’d roust him and haul him in on suspicion of having an attitude in public, print him, and then there would be a trial. Probably not.
Trask’s cell phone rang.
“Trask.”
“It’s Mitchell.”
“Hey, Mitch.”
“Just got a call from my favorite client.”
“And how is Mister Santos today?”
“He says Ortega just left on a plane for El Salvador. Said he used the alias of Saul Moreno.”
“A taste for irony. How’d Santos come up with that?”
“He said his sister knows a gal that’s been sleeping with Ortega. The info came from the girlfriend.”
“Thanks. We’ll check it out.”
Twenty minutes later, Trask pulled a card from his briefcase and dialed the personal cell phone of Miguel Navarrete-Ponce, ambassador to the United States from El Salvador.
“How are you Jeff?”
“Been better, Mr. Ambassador. I need a favor.”
“Name it.”
“We got a tip that Ortega boarded a flight for San Salvador a couple of hours ago. He’s using an alias. We checked with the airline and verified that a passenger by that name is on the flight. I’d like some help extraditing Mr. Ortega back to the States for trial.”
“I think I can help. I’ll make some calls.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Certainly. Anytime.”
The ambassador dialed the international call from memory. When the voice answered, he did not say hello.
Esteban Ortega walked out the front door of the terminal of the Comalapa International Airport in San Salvador. He held a small duffle bag in his right hand and scanned the line of vehicles picking up passengers for the one he expected. He did not see it. He did see a dark panel truck parked on the curb.
Fuckin’ Huey. I told him to be here.
He dropped the duffle bag to the sidewalk. As he took the phone from his pocket to make the call, someone pulled a dark bag over his head. Ortega brought his arms up to fight the bag, but a fist slammed into his diaphragm, and he felt the air leaving him. Strong arms on both sides threw him onto the floor of the waiting van. There was a knee in his back. Ortega tried to fight, but was outnumbered and still struggling for breath. His kidnappers bound his hands and feet and gagged him. He heard them move toward the front of the van, leaving him alone on the floor. The bag was still over his head.
He tried to feel the cords, hoping to recognize the knot, but he couldn’t move his hands normally.
My thumbs are tied together!
The van left pavement and rattled over crude roads for what seemed to be an eternity. Ortega felt himself being pulled out of the truck. Someone forced him down into the grass on the side of the road. The bag was pulled from his head. He felt a drop of rain on his cheek.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my review team for their suggestions and sharp eyes: my sister Jamie, daughter Jennifer, Tania Santander, Carolyn Dean Yeatman, and the editors at CreateSpace.
As always, thanks to my wife, Lea, for believing in this whole crazy ride before it started.
Other Books By Marc Rainer
Capital Kill
A few short blocks from the safety of the museums and monuments on the National Mall, a ruthless killer prowls the streets of Washington, DC. Federal prosecutor Jeff Trask joins a team of FBI agents and police detectives as they try and solve the series of brutal murders. As the body count rises, the investigation leads to a chilling confrontation with the leader of an international drug smuggling ring, and no one is safe, not even the police. Capital Kill is a swirling thrill ride through the labyrinth of a major federal investigation and trial, with a gripping conclusion that no one will see coming.
“Lawyer Jeff Trask is just settling into his new job as an Assistant US Attorney when he becomes embroiled in a high-stakes international
case that could break an already-strapped legal system. Characters are well developed, and the elements are assembled so seamlessly that the story feels fresh. Rainer’s attention to setting also shines through. The streets of Washington, DC, come alive; those who have lived or worked in the nation’s capital will recognize Rainer’s cunning use of seedy locales to give the action in the book a realistic tone. The book’s intense action, realistic tone and memorable characters will keep readers engrossed in this thriller with a superb payoff.”
—Kirkus Reviews
Readers’ Reviews of Capital Kill:
“As a lawyer and prosecutor, I love legal thrillers, with this one caveat: They must be realistic portrayals of the law enforcement community. Sadly, many legal thriller and crime novels do not achieve the level of realism that I demand. THIS book, unlike so many others in this genre, portrays law enforcement and the duties of prosecutors in a very realistic manner, without sacrificing drama or excitement. I recommend this book for anybody who loves crime novels and lawyer novels, and who demands realistic portrayals of the people involved in those professions. Five Stars!”
“I thoroughly enjoyed Capital Kill. The plot involves a Jamaican drug gang operating out of DC, and the joint efforts of the Federal Prosecutors, FBI, DEA, Metro Police, and even the RCMP in putting the gang out of business while attempting to nab a serial killer. As a trial attorney, I enjoyed the discussion of tactics of cross-exam of an expert witness. I even picked up a pointer or two after 25+ years of trying cases. The characters are well-drawn and you feel a great deal of empathy for most of the law enforcement characters, and a real chill when the ‘evildoer’ is in action. Can’t recommend Mr. Rainer’s book enough.”
“Like a spider weaving his web, Marc Rainer spins a great story, drawing the reader in, page by page, character by character. A fast-paced first novel that leaves the reader wanting more! Don’t start reading this novel if you don’t have time to finish; it is hard to put down! Marc’s storytelling skills are excellent and his explanations of the Judicial System and agencies are easy for the layman to follow. I highly recommend this book to ANYONE that enjoys a good read.”